


The Romantics All Died Much Too Young

by Harlanhardway (Target44)



Category: Victor Frankenstein (2015)
Genre: Developing Relationship, M/M, Period-Typical Medicine, Post-Canon, and by this I mean over-the-counter opiates, igor is okay with this, igor pov, victor frankenstein might be a bit crazy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-31 10:37:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15117614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Target44/pseuds/Harlanhardway
Summary: Victor, never one to show up empty handed, had returned from the Near East with a mummy, two dead dolphins, half a million bad ideas, a handful of good ones and a cat.Victor returns to London, still brilliant and still crazy.  Igor decides he's mostly okay with it.





	The Romantics All Died Much Too Young

**Author's Note:**

> This might be the most ship-able movie I have seen in a while. So of course I had to write for it, even though I saw it several years too late. I don't care if there are only four people in this fandom, it is so immensely ship-able, I can't even.

Victor Frankenstein was a vain man, but not in a way that was particularly kind to himself.  He liked expensive brocade waistcoats and bright ascot ties.  He was the only man Igor had ever known to wear a morning dress suit in full maroon with heeled boots to match, and that was coming from someone who had spent a good fifteen years of his life in a circus.  He cleaned under his fingernails every night and trimmed his beard every morning, styling his hair with wax to give it a natural looking curl so that he looked like a romantic poet: the Lord Byron of medical science.  
  
Or, if not Lord Byron himself, then at least Lord Byron's Prometheus: prideful and tortured and brilliant.  
  
_And in thy Silence was his Sentence,_  
_And in his Soul a vain repentance,_  
_And evil dread so ill dissembled,_  
_That in his hand the lightnings trembled._  
  
It was a more apt comparison than Igor would ever admit to within Victor's hearing.  Victor was, after all, a vain man.  
  
Igor had known Victor Frankenstein for a little over two years and in that time had gained a name, a body that could walk upright, freedom of choice and agency over his own life and the means to realize a vocation he had previously only yearned for in that unfathomable, desperate way that a worm yearns after rain in the desert.  Victor Frankenstein had given Igor access to learning and to scientific exploration.  Like fire to a caveman, he had changed Igor's life in ways so fundamental that most days, Igor couldn't even fully conceptualize them.  
  
But even the Good Lord takes away with the same hand that he gives and Victor Frankenstein was no divine intervention.  He was just a man.  And after almost a year of working side by side with him, living and breathing and sweating next to him in the noxious, two-story lab Victor liked to call his apartments, it had become painfully, violently clear that Victor was not a well man.  
  
After the disastrous end met by the human homunculus, Victor had disappeared for a period of almost nine months, leaving without so much as a goodbye and then blowing back into London one seemingly random stormy afternoon in the Spring, as if driven North by a warm weather front off the Atlantic.  Wiping off his hat and draping his overcoat next to Igor's over the drying rack on the hearth, he acted as if he had just returned from a quick trip to the pharmacist's around the corner.  He seemed completely unsurprised to find the damage from the police break-in and subsequent fire almost entirely repaired.  The doors and windows had been rehung and replaced, the carpets cleaned, the furniture restored and the laboratory equipment meticulously sorted, catalogued, and reassembled.  Victor took it all in with one sweeping glance and then, without so much as an acknowledging nod to note his approval, directed his luggage be brought in behind him.  
  
Igor had watched Victor’s arrival in shock, sitting at his old oak writing desk, working on his courses for St. Mary's Medical College.  (The tragically departed Igor Strausman had been a student there and enrollment one of the perks of assuming his identity.  Though some had likely noticed the change in his person, no one seemed keen on commenting, so long as he continued to pay down on the man's debts.  Igor considered this to be a mostly even trade.)  Victor, never one to show up empty handed, had returned from the Near East with a mummy, two dead dolphins, half a million bad ideas, a handful of good ones and a cat.  
  
Nine months was a long time to be gone and still expect a seamless return, especially considering how things had been left.  One half-sane letter containing backhanded platitudes and vague promises to return should not have been enough to smooth over the madness and horror of the murder, death and grotesque reanimation that had happened at the castle.  But somehow, that was how it happened anyways.  Igor found himself putting out food for the cat, helping to prepare a brine for the partially preserved dolphins, hosting a modestly attended mummy unwrapping party, listening to Victor's half million terrible ideas, his handful of good ones and then laying Victor down on the newly reupholstered couch with a diluted dose of heroine to calm his nerves as soon as he wound himself up to the point where he started spitting.  
  
And that was how things continued.  It had been three months since Victor’s return.  The good ideas were incredibly good, the bad ideas were incredibly bad and sometimes Victor would work himself into a fit, almost like a madness, until Igor got him to set down on the couch with a low-dose opioid, calming the fire in his mind so that he could think rationally again.  
  
He was there now: on the couch, blinking slowly --very slowly-- up at the ceiling, while Igor sat at his writing desk, taking advantage of the quiet to go over his course work.  He still maintained the ambition to become an accredited doctor, despite Victor having himself given up on those dreams sometime ago in favor of independent research.  
  
"Do you think there is something broken about my brain?"  Victor asked, not looking away from the ceiling.  
  
Neither of them had spoken in more than an hour and it startled Igor out of his studies.  He looked over towards the couch.  "How do you mean?"  
  
"If I were a God-fearing man, I would say that I had been touched in the head."  
  
"Good thing you're not, then."  Igor turned all the way around in his chair to face Victor.  It was not often that he brought up God in conversation, except maybe to comment with disdain on the gullibility of the masses, and they had never talked about Victor’s episodes before.  
  
Victor ran his hand across the silk upholstery of the couch-back.  The patterned stitching rasped softly against his fingers.  He squinted up at the ceiling and tilted his head slightly.  "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."  
  
Igor stared at his profile incredulously.  "You're not drawing me into an argument over the existence of God.  Whether he does or does not exist is of no concern to me and certainly has nothing to do with your brain.  There are plenty of machines that need to be cooled down when they overheat: steam engines, steel, even stone will split or throw a spark.  Your brain is just running a fever and needs to rest for awhile.  Price of being a genius, I suppose, you overwork it sometime."  
  
That seemed to chear Victor up a bit.  His lips curled into a smile as he looked up at the ceiling.  He was, after all, a vain man.  That had certainly not changed since he had been back, anymore than the color of his eyes or the styling of his hair.  
  
A few moments passed as Victor considered this explanation.  Then he frowned again.  "No, if brain fevers were a symptom of genius, you would have them too."  He turned his head to the side, meeting Igor’s gaze, his blue eyes sharp and surprisingly clear.  "You do not.  You are without flaw."  
  
Igor snorted.  "Me, without flaw?  The hunchback from the circus who never bothered with a knife and fork until after his twentieth birthday?  I impersonate a dead man on a daily basis, just so they will let me in the front door of the college."  
  
"You," Victor confirmed, not looking away.  "A benign abscess is hardly a flaw, you don't even drop your shoulder anymore when you stand, and you've already done more with that name than anyone who had it before you ever did.  Soon you'll be a doctor, then soon after that, married: fat, happy and brilliant, with plenty of children to make yourself immortal."  
  
Igor turned away, unable to stomach the naked longing and jealousy in Victor's face.  He traced the woodgrain of the writing desk with this thumb.  "Lorelei moved to Paris with her benefactor while you were gone."  They hadn't talked about it, but he had assumed that Victor had known anyways.  Maybe he hadn't.  
  
"There is more than one pretty trapeze artist in all of in London."  
  
Igor coughed, swallowing down the urge to argue.  Lorelei had been so much more to him than just a pretty face, but that wasn't the point.  Victor wasn’t talking about Lorelei anyways, not really.  He turned back towards the couch and Victor's thousand yard stare.  "I'm sure you could go back to finish your degree, if you wanted.  If those are things you wanted: a wife, a practice, children, all that."  
  
Victor laughed and raised an eyebrow, his face going harsh, sharp and hawk-like.  "Yes, because when was the last time you saw me with a woman?"  He made a noise of disgust and rolled over to look up at the ceiling again, wiping his hands off on his pants and shuddering to himself as if nauseated by the very idea.  "I don’t know how you put up with it.  I can't stand when stupid people touch me."  
  
"Not all women are stupid."  
  
Victor sneered.  "Please, this isn't about women, this is about stupidity.  I can't be blamed if the only other non-idiot I have ever come across happens to be a man."  
  
"Oh you’ve found one have you?  Who?"  
  
Victor's one eyebrow went up again and his eyes slid to the side, watching Igor skeptically for a few moments without turning his head, until Igor blinked and sat up straight in surprise, the answer finally dawning on him.  
  
"Oh!"  
  
Victor rolled his eyes back up towards the ceiling.  "Mostly not an idiot, anyways.  Though I suppose we all have our blind spots."  
  
"Well... umm... I..."  Igor stuttered, lost for words.  
  
Victor brought his hands up to cover his face, rubbing at his eyes, digging aggressively into his eye sockets in a way that had to be painful.  He was never one to be kind to himself.  "No, don't say anything.  Never mind.  It's just the heroine making me sentimental.  Give me five minutes and I will be back to work in the lab.  It's the solid-core wiring that's the problem, braided is much more stable, you were right.  The mummy has nothing to do with it, too much carbon."  
  
Igor stood up while Victor talked into his hands.  He walked over to the couch, touching his fingers to the armrest by Victor's head, just barely brushing the tips of his hair, and looked down at him.  Victor was such a strange man: brilliant, lonely and completely incapable of keeping his own council.  He was a social pariah who pretended not to care what other people thought of him, but was so terrible at lying that the desperation practically bled out of his eyes, even as he turned away in scorn.  
  
Like now.  
  
Victor let his hands drop away from his face and looked up at him.  His blue eyes were bright and surprisingly soft, his face uncharacteristically open, but Igor could tell that in just one more second he would be up and off the couch, stalking down to his lab, still half-high but self-aware enough to want the conversation to be over.  Science was a passion, but sometimes it was also an escape.  So instead of letting him run away to hide in the basement and stew, Igor leaned down and kissed him.  
  
Time slowed down as their lips met.  Victor had a very soft mouth.  His beard scratched, but not in an unpleasant way, and his hands were warm and strong, smoothing down on the back of Igor's neck and tangling in his hair.  Victor had responded immediately, without so much as a moment of hesitation or surprise.  He wasn't a man to ever be slowed down by an unexpected windfall.  Victor took things as they came and he was taking this with both his hands, licking into Igor's mough and softly tracing its contours with his tongue.  
  
Igor pulled back and watched Victor slowly open his eyes, his gaze coming into focus and immediately settling on Igor's mouth.  Victor’s thumb pressed against his bottom lip and Igor licked at it, making Victor's blue eyes dialate to almost black.  
  
"You would be fine with this?" he asked, continuing to run his hand through Igor's hair, keeping him crouched down by his side and making no move to release him.  "This is not some violation of your moral code?"  
  
"My parents sold me to the circus before I can remember and I spent most of my life as a sideshow freak.  I wouldn't say I have a particularly discerning standard for morality."  Igor shrugged ruefully and leaned down to kiss Victor again, just briefly this time, a dry press of lips.  “Sometimes it’s better not to question a good thing.”  
  
He rested his head against Victor's chest, his cheek pressed to the silk brocade of Victor's waistcoat.  It was warm.  Victor was a warm person, he burned hot, and Igor took a moment to enjoy it, to listen to the beat of his heart and feel the rhythm of his deep, even breathing.  
  
"I don't know what you’re asking for, Victor, and I won’t promise anything.  But I like this and..."  Igor trailed off as he looked up, laughing at Victor's severe expression and poking him pointedly in the forehead, right between his eyebrows.  Victor frowned a lot, even when he was smiling.  It tended to make him look slightly deranged and emphasize the not entirely inconsequential size of nose.  "When you're not working at odds with your own best qualities, you are actually quite an attractive person.  I would give this a try, so long as it doesn't get in the way of our medical research."  
  
Victor smiled, bright and hopeful.  "Get in the way of our medical research?  Never.  The research is everything.  Life is nothing without science."  
  
But even as he said it, Victor was running his hand through Igor's hair, petting his cheek and rubbing his thumb carefully over the knob of Igor's shoulder, tracing the lines of his brace, where it cut into his back.  Victor was a madman and a terrible liar, so full of brilliance that it burned him up from the inside and so full of self-doubt that he couldn't find his own left hand in a dark room.  The research may have been everything, but this was not nothing.  Two infinities together, was still infinite.  
  
Igor reached up to adjust Victor's hair, where it had flattened on one side from being pressed up against the back of the couch.  He felt suddenly enormously fond of it, fluffing it out with his fingers and curling it back around Victor's ears until it framed his face again.  Dark brown, like a true romantic, it always shone slightly red under artificial light.  
  
In another lifetime, had Frankenstein not been a scientist, he would, perhaps, have been a poet.  _Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!_   Percy Shelley would have been proud of his hubris, daring to defy all laws of man and nature in search of pure platonic truth.  But Igor was happy that this was not that lifetime; Victor was his Prometheus and he would not give him up.  Besides, the romantics all died tragically and much too young.  Better to be a scientist.

**Author's Note:**

> "Prometheus" by Lord Byron  
> "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley


End file.
